Love Letter to the Interstate System

A certain type of traveler, the “I-only-watch-PBS” type of traveler, scorns the Interstate. These travelers are all about the blue highways, those small rural roads that require time and patience and don’t send you hurtling through America’s heartland. (Today’s rumination is brought to you courtesy of this New Yorker cartoon, which got me thinking when it turned up in my email inbox.)

But I love America’s great Interstate system, officially (and a little frighteningly) called The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

I love the scale of Interstates, the signs that direct you not from town to town, but from great city to great city: SOUTH—MIAMI; WEST—LOS ANGELES. These signs give me the same thrill as an international airport. They speak to the adventurer in me. I love the sight of a major interchange, with underpasses and overpasses cutting through the sky, shuttling us around in our little pods. This is industrial art on a most massive scale. (And I swear, I wrote this post hours before someone turned me on to this fabulous Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges.)

A long-distance drive on the Interstate system is the best way to comprehend the size of America and her spectacular geography. It’s like time-lapse photography, revealing how the hills of the East relax into the plains, which then start furrowing like a worried brow before the ground heaves and the Rocky Mountains burst from its crust. Then the ground flattens again and parches before we reach the jagged western edge of the nation.

I’ll never forget my first cross-country drive with a couple of friends when, after days driving past hypnotic corn fields, we spotted the first, barely discernible purple glimmers of the Rockies in the distance. “I’ve always wondered,” one friend mused, “how the pioneers must have felt after weeks and weeks slogging across the prairies, then seeing ... that.” Ah, but we can cut right through those mountains lickety-split if we choose, on the Interstate. The Interstates go underground and over water, along the coast and through the desert. They take us from city to town to the middle of nowhere and back again. (Interstate trivia: The longest route in the system is I-90 from Seattle to Boston, I learned on the government website about the system.)

Of course, for an intimate experience with America, you have to get off the main drag. But for a broad view, a bold view of everything America has, of her scale and breadth and splendor, we have our broad, bold, splendid Interstates. God bless ’em.

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